FAQ

She had mentioned that the creepers come out at night, at the end of the month they run out of food and go searching for more. So the likely explanation is that they are cannibals and they took her as food.

We don't know much about Cabbie but he could have been a criminal as well as a cab driver or maybe he wasn't and just decided to stay when they moved in all the criminals.

The contents of the tape are never explicitly revealed in the movie, but we can make certain assumptions.

Hauk states that the United States is at war, and that the President was on his way to a meeting called the Hartford Summit. China and the Soviet Union are waiting at the summit, so the implication is that (in the movie's alternate future) the U.S. is at war with them. Hauk says that the President's arrival is "critical to the fate of the human race," so the summit is most likely a last-ditch effort to put an end to World War III, an all-out nuclear war. Without the President and the tape, Hauk says, the representatives of China and the Soviet Union will go back to their countries, presumably to continue fighting the war.

One possibility is that the tape contains the speech that the President was going to deliver at the Summit. That seems unlikely, since there's no reason the President couldn't have improvised a new speech containing the basic theme of the old one. Besides, the President could have written the speech down instead of recording it on a tape, and his staff would have had a copy of the speech.

When Snake asks what is on the tape, Hauk replies by asking Snake what he knows about cold fusion. Cold fusion was, at the time of the movie's production, a theoretical process to create unlimited energy. At one point in the cab, a brief portion of the tape is played. The voice on the tape describes radioactive elements before it's shut off. So we know the contents of the tape are related to nuclear technology.

This leaves two possibilities. One is that the tape's recording contains a description of some revolutionary form of nuclear power which the President is sharing with the Communist nations. Giving the technology to the enemy might be a goodwill gesture or revealing the technology might have been a condition of Russia and China's appearance at the summit. Another possibility might be that the tape describes all of the nuclear secrets of the United States. Revealing these secrets might be (again) a goodwill gesture to the enemy or part of the terms of the summit. Either way, the President failing to deliver the technology ends all hope of the summit's success.

But the boring answer is that it really doesn't matter what was on the tape in the briefcase, as the tape and the briefcase together are a 'MacGuffin', a plot device to get the story going.

A third explanation could be the information on the tape is proof of superior nuclear advancement to back up threats made. Without this proof the advantage at the negotiations is gone.

There is a fan-made one called Escape from New Jersey (2010). Set Straight after Escape From New York, we find Snake Plissken stuck in New Jersey with his new found freedom on the line when his path crosses that of Armando Barone, the crime kingpin of the Garden State. With his Presidential pardon in Barone's grasp, Snake is once again forced to re-steal the money that got him sent to New York Prison in the first place. Can Snake pull off the job? Will he ever truly be free? But more importantly, can he escape New Jersey? This one is directed by a fan of the original two movies Chris R. Notarile and stars Hector De La Rosa as Snake.